Tag: Big Data

Internet of Things (IOT) continues to grow rapidly enabled by the internet, cloud computing, sensors, and cell phones. A rapidly growing subcategory is the Location of Things (LOT) with is expected to reach $71.6B by 2025. LOT is focused on connected devices enables connected devices to communicate their geographic location. This is creating new forms of big data and analytics that many companies are eager to collect and leverage. North America and Europe accounted for the majority share in the location of things markets today but Asia is growing rapidly.

I attended the February PDMA event hosted at Optum. The Minneapolis chapter had arranged both a tour of the Optum facility and a panel discussion on the intersection of Product Management, Product Development, and Data Analytics. The event started with a networking session while tours were conducted. The tour featured several customer showcase areas. The first was visiting a large digital analytics command room that was several stories tall and covered in monitors with real-time information showing a vast amount of healthcare related actives across the united states. This room could be used to monitor the outbreaks and spreading of disease and the activities of the healthcare providers. It allows Optum to actively support the healthcare system with early identification of trends and coordination of activities. We headed into a detailed analytics room that featured individual station with large interactive touch screens. Our tour guides took use through numerous analytics scenarios with real-time drill down into trends, treatments, and member services that were possible with the depth of data they have been able to integrate and create the capabilities to explore and interact with data. This section of the tour concluded in a large surround screen video experience around the future of healthcare.

The event continued with the panel discussion featuring 6 panelists ranging from corporate to consultants with various backgrounds in the product and analytics spaces. With an audience size around 100 people, they did some polling and it saw a split between attendees being more on the product side vs. pure data scientists. The panel also talked briefly about the 5 eras of product development that was broken out accordingly:

Create a product in isolation and push it out through advertising

Customer focus groups

Lean / Design Thinking / Customer Discovery

Data Science

Now we need to integrate 3 & 4

It was highly stressed that many data projects fail and the root cause is the lack of defining what value you want to get out of the data up front. Meaning you have to define the questions you are trying to answer before getting lost in analysis. While data analysis can also discover anomalies and trends along the way, that should be secondary to understanding what you are trying to learn from it. The questions also help define the “right” data you want vs. getting overwhelmed with studying “all” the data. In the end, your looking for the problem that your product/service can solve, not the offering itself in the data.

I attended the 2014 Minneapolis CDO Executive Summit as a guest of the MN State CIO and Director of Innovation. The event featured an extensive number of speakers sharing their experiences in establishing practices around data aggregation and analytics. The real world perspectives from corporate professions was very insightful to the challenges and levels of investment required to make these initiatives successful. As I’m currently working on extensive models around data & analytics regarding economic development and innovation metrics I found the networking opportunities at the event invaluable and have led to a number of working groups that continue on since the event.

The event resonated with the years of experience I spent on strategic initiatives with companies, specifically in the areas of building the data analytic organizations and systems. Here is a quick top 10 considerations I constantly ran into:

These are new capabilities that have to be developed. Not to be confused with existing IT data organizations that are maintaining operational systems. It takes more time, money, and commitment than most organization understand and will require most areas of the company to participate vs. an isolated team approach.

Funding the practice will span not only technology, but a wide range of skills sets from data architecture, system integration, analytics, etc. Many companies underestimate the amount of time/cost business subject matter experts will need to be involve and participate in developing the insights that come from the analytics.

While existing system integration seems like a large task, there is a significant amount of information and meta data that your organization has NOT been capturing over the past decades. One mitigation approach is to find strategic partnerships that can leverage their data to create combined data sets that are vastly more valuable than a single organization and can cover history data gaps.

Integrating to public data sources is a vastly under utilized resource. Many state governments are working to improve systems, apis and crowdsourcing efforts to create more value out of this data. I have also seen companies create portions of internal data and created their own public share. This has paid big dividends in terms of the crowdsourcing solutions that have come out of that data and the strategic partnerships that it has attracted.

An organization should not under estimate the value of analytics of data outside of ones core customer demographics. It might be the key to understand what you don’t know about the market and customer needs.

Channel data is a frequent point for data collection investments, but many orgs fail to capture the data for cross channel analytics.

Look past just the data in the channel, but into the value chain of systems, orgs, and partners that the channels trigger. Many organizations do not understand the operational considerations that channel activation puts on their own organizations. Especially when adding new channels.

Partner and supply chain data is a great source of understanding the capabilities of your partners during times of crisis, economic instability and market disruptions. Look for those anomalies to understand how better to support the strengths and weaknesses in your own business ecosystem. Pilot additional partners to compare performance and capability variences.

While many companies are focused heavily on the business analytics, perhaps of of the biggest areas of corporate improvement comes from the aggregation and analytics of internal collaboration of systems and departments. I’ve seen great organization strategies come from the study of internal communication, spending, budgeting, governance, project planning, and project outcomes metrics just to name a few. How good a dashboard to you have in watching organizational behavior and performance over time. What data are you not capturing about your own organization today?

One of the most frequent differences that I found working crossed thousands of organizations was the fact that companies didn’t really understand the maturity levels of their competition in this area. Most companies would attend a conference and come away feeling that everyone was struggling with similar problems. While this is likely true, they where missing the point that other orgs had already committed significant investment to the aggregation of data even though they where still very immature in their capabilities to exploit it. In many cases they didn’t realize their competition already had gained years of data collection in new and strategic data partnerships and they hadn’t even begun yet. Most fail to consider the value of time in terms of data collection. It is hard to go back in time and get the data you failed to capture and your falling behind every day that passes.

In future blogs I will dive more deeply into each of these considerations to explore how different organizations approached each area and what outcomes came for their efforts.

I was recently a co-speaker at the KPMG Innovation Council along with the Minnesota State Director of Innovation James Kauth. Our presentations both talked about data initiatives underlying economic development. This lead to a follow on meeting with the Minnesota State CIO Carolyn Parnell. I was able to present the full scope of the North Star Initiative to create innovation centers and highlighted to opportunities of building a data portfolio covering all aspects of the innovation process and sector activities.

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There was good synergy between the state’s initiatives to make more sources of public data available via apis to drive innovation and see what creative ideas could be generated with the new data sources. The data the innovation centers would both enrich that base of public data and we could see direct mapping opportunities liking data around corporate employee and revenue growth to companies involved with the innovation centers over the long term. This would provide more data and insights into which sectors in the region where both innovating and prospering and help attract more interest to the region.

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Finding grant support for fund a pilot to integrate the data platforms would be a key next step.

I attended an executive salon event hosted by one of the global marketing agencies in Minneapolis. The theme of the presentations focused on the roles of aggregating social data for big data analysis. Two concepts jumps out during the conversation that drove most of the post presentation discussions.

The first was the topic of cross linking social accounts with corporate CRM systems. This was starting to expand a big data picture of the customer. While this is common practice today, they extended the concept to include cross liking with other identity sources such as LinkedIn or Public Tax Records. This started to create a vastly larger profile set of individuals outside of your customer base. These larger sets of profiles could be used to identify trends and patterns that could be leveraged for approach and enticing new customers to your brand or new offerings.

The second topic built on the first but was much more elaborate. They had some guest speakers from new ISVs that where building tools for markets to access a massive big data pool that had been assembling. Several years prior they had launched a backend platform that was constantly listening and recording many social media channels. The platform would be analyzing the content and generating additional meta data and tagging of content to aid in ongoing analysis. An elaborate architecture of meta tag hierarchies where defined to provide categorization of subject matters. Even more impressive was the ontologies that where defined between the hierarchies to cross relate topics. The end result in the analysis seemed to be an enormous multiplier in the ability to cross-relate cross channel data and inter-relate thematic trends and insights. Since seeing this demo I’ve noticed several new companies building out these types of solutions. While the science side of the platforms to do this is fairly straight forward it is the Art of creating the inter-relationships of the ontologies across the hierarchies that will define the state-of-the-art of competitive analysis.